My ramblings about all things technical

VMworld Day 2 Recap

VMworld day 2 is always a good one for me personally as it’s the day you get the tech really spoken about and shown that has been announced at the show. If you missed my blog postings around some of the big announcements from day 1 then have a look below:

My day started with the keynote and again i watched it from the VMVillage in the bloggers area which I always enjoy as you can watch the keynote over the big screens but also sit with fellow vExpert bloggers. If you missed the keynote from either of the days then you can re-watch them here. One of the big announcements from the keynote was Pivotal Container Service, I was fortunate enough to be on a early access program where they went over the solution. It looks to be a really great solution and certainly has made me think I need to learn Kubernetes as I can see some amazing use cases for my customers.

After the keynote I went and watched a bit of a vBrownbag session. The vBrownbag of which I am one of the team have been doing TechTalks all week and record the sessions as well as stream it live. I will certainly be watching these after the conference as there has been some amazing content and now that the sessions are in the content catalog we have been getting solid crowds all week with some being three people deep standing and watching due to all the seats being gone.

Next I attended VMware Cloud on AWS: An Architectural and Operational Deep Dive [LHC3174BU]-the session was really interesting although i was slightly disappointed that the session was more a walk through of how to build your SDDC rather than anything around architecture design which i found disappointing seeing as this was meant to be a deep dive.Also he stated he was engineer so there’s no demo it’s all screenshots. I took some notes from the session

Covered what AWSonVMC offers.

What organisations are and how these map across all VMware Cloud Services.

Covered the real requirement of ensuring you choose the correct CIDR block as this cannot be changed

vCenter permissions and the lock down required to ensure there were essentially a VMware owned Admin and a customer owned admin.

Showed what the architecture is and what it uses from AWS to allow VMC

Hybrid linked mode explained

Covered at a high level what provision management, remediation/troubleshooting, release coordination, auto-scaler, configuration management, telemetry and alerting service do

Broke down the networking concepts – recommended watching/attending Ray Budavari’s session to learn much much more.

Walked through the flow of a failure of a host- covered all the players if what is required for VMware to fix the issues in an automated fashion.

Covered how there is an SRE team to ensure the SaaS service works as it should (copy steps from picture)

All these sessions make me feel you need to really learn AWS to a certain level so you understand what VPC’s are etc as a fair amount of people in the VMC sessions I’ve been to seem to struggle to understand the AWS side of the service.

Next I attended AWS Native Services Integration with VMware Cloud on AWS: Technical Deep Dive [LHC3376BUS]. – this sessions was really good and the live demo and technical depth was what i was hoping for from the previous session, Again I wrote down a bunch of notes from the session below and would highly recommend watching this session after the show

Nice to hear from the AWS side and what their side of the partnership is.

Recommended reporting services like cloudwatch and cloudtrail, VMware are using these as well for part of their monitoring for you

Gave a use case and how to deliver the services for the fake company ACME distribution

Did a demo of building and running all the components required by ACME utilising VMC and AWS services.

After this I participated in a design studio UX session where we went through vRealize Lifecycle manager and gave feedback on what I liked and didn’t like and what i expected. I really enjoyed this as it was just me and the engineer and seeing as I’ve done vRA,vRO etc I was able to give some solid feedback from someone who knows the products and how to install them outside the usage of lifecycle manager. The engineer was very grateful which i always nice to be able to help.